Personhood is everywhere. Netflix recently added Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends to their “instant play” repertoire, which means I may or may not have spent several hours watching a cartoon from the early sixties as part of my Saturday routine. As usual, there was a little bit of transhumanist propaganda hidden [...]]]>

Personhood is everywhere. Netflix recently added Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends to their “instant play” repertoire, which means I may or may not have spent several hours watching a cartoon from the early sixties as part of my Saturday routine. As usual, there was a little bit of transhumanist propaganda hidden within it.

In the first episode of the series, where everyone is introduced, we first meet Mr. Peabody doing yoga in his penthouse in New York City. Glancing at the Way-Back-Machine, Peabody notes, “ah, that’s Sherman’s. Sherman is my boy.” Peabody recounts how he acquired Sherman, spoofing the story of how a person gets their first dog: he looked and looked at strays in the pound, but some sad mutt on the street, Sherman, won his heart. Peabody rescues Sherman from bullies and, upon trying to return him to the orphanage, is saddened by the condition of Sherman’s life.

What makes this so interesting is that the cartoon acknowledges that Peabody is a dog and that dogs can’t adopt a boy. That Peabody can graduate Harvard, work on the stock market, or enlist in the foreign service, or develop projects for the government (key points in his auto-bio) aren’t big deals, but when he wants to start a family of his own, suddenly that’s a legal matter. Peabody goes through the adoption process and gets references from old friends (the sitting president), but a trial still occurs.

The prosecution’s case: “This dog isn’t a fit person to raise the boy, in fact, he isn’t a person at all!” Ah, yes, the dehumanization defense. Sad.

Peabody, acting as his own lawyer (of course) retorts: “Thank you, I consider that an excellent recommendation.” (Yes, Mr. Peabody is in fact using reverse discourse to turn the prosecution’s insult into a point in his favor.)

The court decides, “We see no reason that if a boy can have a dog, a dog can’t have a boy.”

Sometimes it takes a cartoon to cut through the the legalese and make a point so obvious. Children accept the evidence in front of them: Mr. Peabody is smart, good, and responsible; Sherman lives in an orphanage with a terrible head master; Mr. Peabody would like to adopt Sherman, everybody wins. In this rare case, the courts actually make the right decision for the right reasons and the brilliant Peabody takes Sherman home.

Now think about the scenario this way: Mr. Peabody, a successful, intelligent committed-bachelor with no interest in women, living in New York City, who wears a bow-tie and has an aloof speech affectation, decides he would like to adopt a child, but is told by the courts he cannot because he isn’t fit. Is anyone seeing any parallels, here? I often wonder if shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle accidentally placed the seeds of social liberalizing. It sounds like a plot Glenn Beck would dream up: “Now, I’m not saying this is true, but isn’t it interesting how Rocky and Bullwinkle are both men, but the two Soviet spies, Boris Badinov and Natasha, are a couple? And why doesn’t Mr. Peabody have a wife? Is this cartoon, this show for children, saying America is a land of homosexuality and pedophilia, while communist Russia is the country with the proper values? These are just questions, people, but why am I the only one asking them?” Beck would then attempt to derive some hidden message from the various animals portrayed on the show using his magic blackboard of insanity.

The point, if there is one here, is that a cartoon in the sixties figured out that adoption is a matter of taking a child in a bad or sad position and putting that child into a home with a parent or parents who will love and care for him or her. That’s it. Why we haven’t figured that out yet in 2010 I don’t know.

One of the biggest letdowns for me about the film Wall-E was that all of the robots, save the evil navigator, were in some way visually anthropomorphic. They had hands, eyes, voices, that were unmistakably humanish. Pixar’s great mascot, Luxo Jr., managed to be lovable without these traits. There is a certain [...]]]>

One of the biggest letdowns for me about the film Wall-E was that all of the robots, save the evil navigator, were in some way visually anthropomorphic. They had hands, eyes, voices, that were unmistakably humanish. Pixar’s great mascot, Luxo Jr., managed to be lovable without these traits. There is a certain extra level of magic involved in making a great character that is utterly unrecognizable as human*. A key element in making a character inhuman, particularly scary robots, seems to be a single, red, cycloptic eye. HAL 9000, the grandfather of the Evil Red Eye, gave us the cylon, the Terminator’s exposed eye, and the aforementioned navigator from Wall-E, among a host of other, lesser progeny. But there are three notable exceptions to this rule that demonstrate how good characterization can overcome a trope.

Half-Life 2‘s Dog, Caprica‘s Serge, and Star Wars’ R2-D2 are robots that are almost immediately endearing, despite having single glowing eye (a la HAL) and an inhuman construction. Dog is a towering, immensely-strong, home-built hulk, Serge is a svelte, iPod-inspired, teardrop robot with a very classy demeanor, and R2 is basically a mailbox. None are recognizably human, though Dog is arguably mammalian (his knuckle lope is a mix of gorilla/chimp and giraffe locomotion). What is critical is that none have a face per se. Dog and R2 lack a voice, but are extremely expressive with their sounds (much like Wall-E and Luxo). Alternatively, Serge is utterly stoic, but has a weird lilt to his voice that makes him strangely likable. What is it that makes these characters work?

First, let’s take a quick look at humanoid lovable robots. Two examples that spring to mind are Mr. Butlertron from Clone High and Data from Star Trek: TNG. Both combine tropes of robots with human features. In terms of appearance, Data is fully human (and fully functional: WINK) in appearance, but has stark yellow eyes and inhumanely pale skin. Mr. Butlertron moves around on wheels, is visibly metal, has an antenna, and pincer hands, but also a mustache. Both wear clothing. Both Data and Mr. Butlertron have a robotic manner of speaking, with Mr. Butlertron being a bit auto-tuned and Data being stilted. It is all the more striking, then, that both are highly altruistic and affectionate. Mr. Butlertron gives great relationship advice and is loved by high schoolers, while Data demonstrates unwavering loyalty, selflessness, and kindness. Their lack of humanity is compensated by their immense interest in and love of humans and the human condition. They are easy to identify with and see as being essentially human.

Part of the reason we can understand Data and Mr. Butlertron at that level is because they can speak. Interestingly, the ability to speak actually reduces the visceral level of connection we have with the robotic character. In between the speaking androids (Data, Mr. Butlertron) and the one-eye non-hominids (Dog, R2, Serge) are non-speaking hominids like H.E.L.P.eR, the Iron Giant, and Wall-E. Ok, so the Iron Giant and Wall-E have like ten words in their combined vocabulary, but you get my point. The weird aspect of this is that the immediate emotional bond to these characters is increased by their simple form of communication. Because they are not appealing to our higher thought processes but instead to more rudimentary levels of communication – voice tone, body language, and direct action. When the Iron Giant picks up Hogarth mistaking him for dead, or when H.E.L.P.eR hugs Brock in forgiveness, or when Wall-E goes still after being electrocuted, the impact is in the gut. Did cry watching The Iron Giant or Wall-E? I bet you did. The ability to elicit empathy shows powerful characterization, despite a lack of speech. Ultimately, however, these characters are still humanoid, with distinguishable faces and humanish body shape. They’re still too easy to love; we requirest a little lower layer.

And thus we return to Dog, R2, and Serge. What is it that makes them so endearing? Not quite pets, for they are clearly independent and higher functioning, certainly not human, or even full persons. Yet Dog saves Gordon and Alyx and shows distress, much in the way R2 helps the rebels, antagonizes C-3po, and screams in pain. Serge, alternatively, is impossibly proper, a spoof on the reserved-to-the-point-of-repressed butler, his very construction echoing the stiff, arms-at-the-sides, up-right, stance. They look the way they act. Most importantly, unlike the other robots, from Data to Wall-E, Dog, R2, and Serge lack faces. In fact, each only has one eye, which, if we stretch “eye is the window to the soul” the metaphor a bit, might be said that the self of each of these robots lack the depth of their binocular brethren.

What we see in these characters are the artifices of humanity stripped away, and movement into the core of personhood. Each character’s styling as a robot, that is, as entities of pure function, is a very direct reflection of that character’s personality and level of personhood. All three levels of robots that I’ve discussed here, ranging from human-personhood androids, to complex-personhood hominid robots, to limited-personhood non-hominid robots, reflect that our society already understands the different levels at which an entity can have a sense of self, and that we visualized that through the amount of humanness portrayed in a given robot. While I haven’t finished the series yet, I’d be willing to make the guess that Cylons in the new BattleStar Galactica look fully human because they have absolute, full personhood, to the point of having a complex culture representing extended, external personhood.

Robots, as I’ve shown, are one of the best symbols our culture has for representing the degrees of personhood because they are pure function and pure construction.

*Want a real challenge? Write a story with a lovable, trustworthy, deeply intelligent and complex character (a monumental task in and of itself) that has no recognizable face or body. The closest thing I’ve found to that anywhere is The Luggage from Discworld.

Over at Oxford’s Practical Ethics,  Lena Groegner’s post on the dolphins as “non-human persons” issue is sober and short, but there is one bit that intrigued me:

The word has long been used to refer to non-human entities: in Christianity we find the three persons of [...]]]>

Over at Oxford’s Practical Ethics,  Lena Groegner’s post on the dolphins as “non-human persons” issue is sober and short, but there is one bit that intrigued me:

The word has long been used to refer to non-human entities: in Christianity we find the three persons of the Holy Trinity, or in law we find the notion of “legal person” to refer to organizations like cities, colleges, or (stirring up quite a controversy recently) corporations. It’s commonly acknowledged that not all persons are human beings. But why should we consider dolphins persons, and what would change if we did?

A great point.

PS – how did I not think of the “Chicken of the Sea” pun? Newlyweds joke + uplift = so goooood

First, various features of the dolphin neocortex — the part of the brain involved [...]]]> I suspect the next decade is going to be packed with news about animal intelligence. Researcher Lori Marino (the humor of a Marino working on Dolphins is not lost on me) notes two major reasons dolphins are so smart:

First, various features of the dolphin neocortex — the part of the brain involved in higher-order thinking and processing of emotional information — are “particularly expanded” in dolphins.

Second, behavioral studies conducted by Marino and other experts demonstrate that dolphins exhibit human-like skills. These include mirror self-recognition, cultural learning, comprehension of symbol-based communication systems, and an understanding of abstract concepts.

My thoughts on dolphin personhood here. Oh, and enjoy the hunting techniques of the bottlenose while we’re on the topic:

["Dolphins: Second-Smartest Animals?" - Discovery News]

I have been lucky enough to swim with dolphins twice in my life. Once it was as a “swim with dolphins” experience in Mexico where I was pushed around by the dolphins in an awesome little display of power and warned not to “pet them on the tummy, or they might get horny, and, [...]]]>

I have been lucky enough to swim with dolphins twice in my life. Once it was as a “swim with dolphins” experience in Mexico where I was pushed around by the dolphins in an awesome little display of power and warned not to “pet them on the tummy, or they might get horny, and, by extension, violent.” It is a strange thing to be cautious not to arouse a cetacean. The second time was snorkeling, when a pod of dolphins came out of the deep and decided to investigate my dad and me for a few minutes before getting on their way. In both cases, the dolphins were visibly intelligent. It was like the uncanny valley in reverse – instead of a lifelike body with dead eyes, I was confronted with unsettlingly intelligent eyes within an inhuman body.

Because the environment of humans and dolphins so rarely intersects, it is much harder for us to observe and casually appreciate dolphin intelligence the way we do with chimps and parrots. Furthermore, dolphin faces are not as familiarly emotive. Thus, the news in The Times about a scientific consensus is developing around the rights of dolphins as non-human persons is fantastic. Here comes a huge chunk of the article summarizing all the reasons why:

Dolphins have long been recognised as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioural studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

What makes the assertion of dolphin personhood so important is that the first recognition of personhood rights in a non-human, even if limited, will have tremendous, spectacular ripple effects. If we accept dolphins are non-human persons, say, with limited rights akin to that of a human child then here are some logical conclusions one might be able make:

1. Dolphins could have limited sovereignty rights, making the oceans they patrol effectively their territory. The ocean might become a UN protectorate.

2. Dolphins would no longer be in zoos and aquariums. It would be tantamount to imprisonment.

3. Alternatively, state funding for the study of dolphins would skyrocket. To ensure the law is accurate and neither a farce nor insufficient, a very accurate, very clear understanding of dolphin intelligence would be needed.

4. Dolphin deaths would become literal murders and deaths resulting from fishing would become genocide.

Without a near global consensus on the issue, it will be nearly impossible to recognize dolphin personhood. Can you imagine the equivalent of the COP15 dealing with international animal rights?